::A Geek in Korea::

Today was a sort of tough day for some of my classes. They had finished their books, and some of them had finished testing, but we still needed to spend a class together doing something. I decided to make it a winter holiday themed class.

The first activity I did with them was to write “2008 Promises”. I call the activity this because they don’t know the word “Resolution”. I introduced the idea, and then had them write what they promised to do next year. Except for some weird boys that promised to kill and eat people next year (Cannibalism is a edgy joke for a 3rd grader) my students all had great resolutions. “I will study harder” was the most popular.

The next activity we had was to take a themed set of words, for example “Hot Chocolate” or “Christmas Tree”, and see how many other words you could make from it. The interesting part was adding a list of clues at the bottom of the paper. These worked like a crossword but the solution was always made with words that came from the phrase the students had to work with.

In the upper level classes, the students not only got to answer these hints, but they also made their own hints to stump the class. For the phrase “Christmas Tree” I personally came up with forty hints for different words. (I built the activity from this document.)

The best was when I would make a hint and students would find a solution I hadn’t even intended. For example, for my hint “a delicious snack”, I was thinking the word “tart”, when one of my students answered “Ice Cream”! That’s awesome!

Tags: games, teaching, review, fun, themed work